The Patriot Post® · The GOP and the Fair Tax

Hot on the heels of the GOP’s vote last week to roll back the Democrats’ excessive IRS funding comes a bold attempt to reimagine the U.S. federal tax code.

HR 25, better known as the Fair Tax Act, was introduced on January 10 by Georgia Congressman Buddy Carter. It would abolish all federal taxes — income taxes, payroll taxes, corporate taxes, and death taxes — and replace them with a 23% national retail sales tax. Naturally, the bill would also do away with the necessarily unnecessary IRS.

This isn’t the first-ever effort to abolish the graduated income tax. Indeed, there have been several attempts to reverse the awful policy foisted on us by the 16th Amendment in 1913. Back then, when the new federal income tax was passed, voters were told by the eat-the-rich leftist politicians of the time that it would only target the top earners in the country, the ultra-rich. Unfortunately, they believed what they were told, only to be unpleasantly surprised later on when the government greatly expanded the income tax to reach into millions of wage-earning pockets in America.

Carter’s Fair Tax bill, which was part of the horse trading required for Kevin McCarthy to win the speakership, attempts to right that grievous wrong.

The Fair Tax is preferable in many ways to the current system lorded over by the IRS. This plan proposes a 23% tax — comparable to a 15% income tax plus the 7.65% payroll tax employers pay — to be calculated and collected at the point of purchase of many goods and services. All federal tax deductions would be eliminated, as would those onerous annual tax returns, including the estimated 6.1 billion hours of prep and $191 billion in paperwork costs. The funding of the federal government would instead be easy and transparent. Workers would not be taxed on the money they earned — only on what they spent.

The Fair Tax isn’t a perfect bill, though. The trade-off is that the 40% of lowest-income American households might be disproportionately hit by the new tax. Many in that bracket currently pay no federal income taxes, and they would also take a hit with higher taxes for groceries and other goods and services.

This disparity could be fixed with a monthly stipend called a “prebate,” a sales tax rebate to offset the tax liability for essential goods. Which goods qualify would have to be determined in advance, as would how to handle such things as business equipment that is bought and then resold later. A federal agency would have to be established to manage these hiccups, and it’s our hope that the memories of past abuses of the IRS would remain fresh when that happens.

Or, should we say, if that ever happens, which is about as likely as Joe Biden suddenly becoming a good president. Much like the Family and Small Business Taxpayer Protection Act that was passed last week, the Fair Tax has zero chance of getting past the Democrat Senate or President Biden. But at least a House vote, whenever it occurs, will tell the American people who’s on their side in the battle to protect their hard-earned incomes.